What is man that You are mindful of him? – September 29, 2016

I have traveled long distances on a bicycle and had the opportunity to spend hours alone with my thoughts. On many occasions, it was easy for me to feel that I was there, all alone with God.

I believe that this is a good prospective from which to start to judge our modern day world and institutions. Because, without digging down this deep, we cannot be totally genuine about an interest in an unbiased perspective.

David was the King of Israel, the killer of Goliath, the writer of much of what we call the book of Psalms in the Bible. David started out as a shepherd. He had the benefit of having many hours to be totally alone with God. This time was not easy. There were bears and lions. Cold miserable nights without shelter – a great time to curse God, if you would, and yet David had a fierce loyalty, a kindred spirit with God. It was said that David was a man after God’s own heart.

David is the closest thing to Adam, the first man, with which we can identify. It is David that wrote, “What is man that you are mindful of him?” These were not empty words for David. He must have meditated, contemplated them for hours, repeated them to himself often, throughout his life, from the start, from his very humble beginnings.

Regardless of our religious persuasion, we must be able to identify with a time when man was there all by himself with God. It was called the Garden of Eden, peaceful, abundant, care free.

Then man started screwing it up. He started using his liberty, his freedom to choose between right and wrong, to do something that God did not want him to do. He used his liberty to choose an aberration over a balanced fellowship with his maker. And, we are told that, once he had done this, he tried to hide from God.

I can’t help but be reminded of the power of pornography and its domination of the Internet. Men and women hide in the hope that they will not be found out, that they have to acknowledge the powerful almost uncontrollable effect of lust. We have not changed. We still believe that we can hide from God or just proclaim that He is not there. Ah, that’s simpler isn’t it?

Today you hear a lot about the importance of institutions. The individual has been reduced to a vote, a means by which a party can implement a platform which, in all earnestness, lacks much relevance to that individual. He is a consumer. His desires and weakness are constantly evaluated and exploited by the manipulators. Government, media, enterprise. There is little respect for the individual.

But, man does not exist for the institutions but rather the institutions exist for man. Don’t they?

This is where we start. If you want to seriously evaluate modern day models for education, governance and industry, you must start at their relevance to the individual.